Digital World Culture Shifts | Navigating Conflicts

When I started with Acoustic Dimensions back in 1996, I’d never had an  e-mail address before.  In fact, AD had a single e-mail from 1-800-BE-A-GEEK for the whole company and we’d use our dialup connection a few times a day to download the correspondence, print it out and sneakernet it around to whoever it was addressed to.  Two years later I was tasked with designing our very first website.  [Sidebar—if you want to go back and look at old versions of your website, you can visit archive.org and use the “Wayback Machine.”  Pretty interesting stuff.  Just don’t hit ]http://www.acousticdimensions.com.]

Flash forward 10 years.  I now have four e-mail addresses that receive heavy traffic.  I write regularly for at least six blogs and have fifty more that pour in through my RSS feed. I do all of my research online, book my travel online, get directions online and do most of my shopping online.

That is a tremendous shift in just 10 years.

Most of us know things are changing.  However the change isn’t happening uniformly.  While parts of our culture are zooming ahead, others are lagging behind creating anomalies in our own personal time-space continuums. (Yes, I’m a complete and total Trekkie.  Isn’t everyone?)

A couple of years ago, when my daughter went to get her driver’s license, we discovered that there was a typo on the US Consular’s Report of Live Birth Abroad.  (My daughter was born overseas.) In a digital world, this is easy to fix.  You can see that my husband is a Hutchison.  See that I’m a Hutchison.  And see that clearly the extra N (HutchiNson) on my daughter’s certificate is a typo.  In the digital world, it simply requires a blinking cursor and a backspace to change.

However government agencies—like most bureaucracies—were designed in a print world.  They depend on forms and hierarchies. Changes are not simple. I’m left with a conflict of worlds.

In navigating conflicts there are two steps: 1) Mission. 2) Activity.  The idea is that your mission—what you want to accomplish—needs  to direct what you do. So, in the case of my daughter’s driver’s license, this required me playing by the print world’s rules—even thought it frustrated me to do so.  (Included me having to fill out an affidavit that said my daughter had been going by the alias “Hutchinson” for the past 16 years. Sigh.)

As I hear churches talking about digital world technologies, a lot of conversation focuses on the activity.  Here’s the thing.  You can easily engage in digital world activity that has absolutely nothing to do with meeting your mission.  And in fact, if your mission doesn’t define your activity, then your activity will end up defining your mission (and not necessarily in desirable ways).  For example, if you move all of your church communication to Twitter or Facebook and completely disengage the part of your congregation who have spent their lives giving to and serving  your church, you’ve failed in your mission.  (Conversely, if you don’t engage in the technology and lose the next generation because you don’t speak their language, you’ve failed in your mission.)

Living in a world that is changing in non-linear ways requires both/and strategy. (As opposed to either/or.) 

This is uncharted territory.  There are few maps for both/and—or for that matter, doing ministry in a world of radical cultural change.  There are going to be conflicts.  But, if you keep your focus on letting the mission define your activity, there is a good chance you will have less of them.

Post a Comment

Comment limit: 500 characters (about 100 words).
Inappropriate or offensive comments will be promptly removed.

Your Name/Handle: